Progress in Development and Design of DynaRigs for Commercial Ships

For most of the past century sailing was (besides very few exceptions) associated with pleasure and racing only. Recently, however, this is changing as the commercial maritime transport sector becomes increasingly interested in direct wind propulsion systems. The reasons are obvious: increasing fuel cost (direct or though emission penalties) and environmental awareness (intrinsic or driven by customer demands). In this paper differences between the design requirements in the commercial market and the pleasure or racing yacht industry are discussed and enhancements to the existing design tools relevant for commercial studies are presented. Sailing yacht studies have repeatedly shown how important it is to design and optimize the aero and the hydro aspects of the vessel in synchrony. This is equally or even more important for commercial ships, where part of the thrust might still come from the engine. Thus, the engine together with economic objectives of the shipping operations enter into the design space. With DynaRigs already having proved highly successful in the pleasure yacht market and possessing key features which are attractive for the commercial shipping, it serves as a good case-study. A few select results are first presented when analyzing the aerodynamic design space alone. Detailed results from several performance analyses via our Performance Prediction Program (PPP) are then discussed as well as some outcomes from the structural analysis to show the importance of combined aero, structure, hydro, and potentially engine as well as economic design decisions. The paper concludes with an outlook on future work.